Apple's iOS 6 Camera app turns Panoramas on their head

When Apple showed off its new Panorama feature in iOS 6, it didn't even demonstrate half of its capabilities--specifically the ability to capture vertical panoramas.

The unveiling of the new Panorama feature in iOS 6's Camera app left many observers unimpressed because they failed to see anything new. After all, there are already plenty of pano apps to choose from in the App Store.

However, as noted in the previous segment, Apple's new iOS 6 Camera app makes Panorama capture easy, Apple isn't just seeking to muscle into territory already staked out by third party apps, but is instead introducing Panorama as a new camera feature intended to capture something different.

Rather than outputting conventional, low resolution dynamic panos, Camera app's Panorama mode captures images as huge as 10,800x2332 and that weigh in at around 16.8MB. Note again that the example images below are highly compressed.

Putting the camera in camera phone

From humble beginnings on the first iPhone, which took only the most basic of photos, Apple has (particularly since the release of iPhone 4) become both a leading camera phone maker and a top innovator in mobile optics, geotagging and photo enhancing software ranging from iPhoto to iMovie.

In fact, the top two cameras of the Flickr Community are the iPhone 4S followed by iPhone 4, with the rest of the top five being the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and REBEL T2i and Nikon D90 (three models that cost around $600-$1500). Among the top smartphones on Flickr, Apple owns four of the top five spots with the iPhone 4S, 4, 3GS and 3G.

So when Apple adds a feature to its camera phones, it's kind of a big deal. It also doesn't happen too often. The last time the company significantly improved its Camera app software was the addition of HDR and face recognition, which were based upon its multimillion dollar acquisitions of IMSense and Polar Rose, respectively.

The Panorama feature in iOS 6 is the latest example of Apple's use of sophisticated software to enhance photos and work around the limitations inherent in mobile device cameras.

Panoramas looking up

While the last segment focused on horizontal Panoramas, Apple's new software is also designed to capture vertical panoramas, sometimes called a "vertorama." These are a bit tricker to capture, since it's more natural to pan from left to right than it is to sweep from the ground up (particularly if you keep going through a full 240 degrees, requiring a yoga-trained back bend).

The results, however, can be spectacular, even downright mindbendingly strange. Here's what one such vertical panorama looks like standing under the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, near Fort Baker, looking toward San Francisco. It was taken at an odd angle to the bridge deck, resulting in a twisted perspective.

More examples follow.

While horizontal panoramas capture an expected horizon of details, vertical panoramas let your camera look way up to portray the epic nature of buildings, trees, and other tall landmarks that can otherwise be difficult to adequately capture in a single shot.

As the previous article noted, panorama capture in iOS 6 acts more like a virtual wide angle or fisheye lens, but with less distortion and with greater detail in the resulting image. That's because you're melding several photographs together, rather than just optically compressing more detail into a single shot.

The above example of San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid with Francis Ford Coppola's copper covered Sentinel Building in the foreground shows what you can do with a partial vertical panorama.

If you stand in Columbus Avenue and bend over backward, you can take a full vertical panorama that captures not just the Pyramid looking straight ahead, but also Columbus looking behind you to the northwest.

Get a little closer to the Pyramid and you can wildly distort both its leggy foundation and the surrounding street grid.

Sharing Panoramas is as easy as any other image. Send one via SMS or iMessage and they'll appear either wide or tall (as shown below). Oddly enough however, when you browse panoramic images in your iOS photo library, they're depicted as uniform squares, making them harder to select from.

Apple should badge them with an Panorama indicator or simply depict them in your library with at least some black letterboxing.

At Embarcadero Center, a vertical panorama captures the imposing height of two of its towers while also grounding the buildings with the iconically round brickwork of the plaza level.

In this shot at San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza, the Embarcadero Hyatt Regency and other buildings of Market Street appear to float above the Ferry Building's clock tower.

Panorama capture in Camera app largely forces you to follow a plumb line using the built-in gyroscope. If you ignore this, you can capture some really odd, twisted angles, but you'll also get black stair stepping you'll have to edit out later, as in this crooked panorama experiment at capturing the Bay Bridge.

Panoramas work great inside too, and vertical panoramas especially so, particularly when inside a building with an impressive ceiling.

Inside the Westfield San Francisco Centre, vertical panoramas capture a different slice of the layers of open floors and its historic Emporium dome.

Retuning to the middle of San Francisco, this vertical panorama of Dolores Park contrasts with the earlier horizontal panorama from the same spot.

Expect iOS 6 Panoramas in both wide and tall orientations to quickly deluge Flickr and other photo sharing sites as experimental photographers try out the new feature.

Looks like somebody was having fun taking those shots. Nice though - even without going 180-degrees overhead, just making it easier to catch a shot of (for example) your kids standing in front of the Sears Tower without having to crawl on the ground seems great.

Vertical panoramas can be very cool if you just need a little extra vertical content and don't go too far with them. I'm looking forward to seeing how iOS handles them with less vertical content. It can be tricky to process images like that in Photoshop with traditional frame-by-frame photography.

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The killer would be a panorama app that could tile (horizontal and vertical) as well as create an image much larger than the amount specified in this article. I've done panoramas with my Canon 60D and the software I use is tied to a photo printing facility that can print really large panoramas. They calculate the largest size possible with the image submitted, trying to keep people from sending them low-resolution images and getting less than optimal prints in return. The 10K x 2.5K image isn't useful on anything much longer than 30" or so. Yes, that sounds big until you see printed panoramas in excess of 6 feet. This application is a great start, which I'll be trying on Friday or Saturday on my iPhone 5,

Somewhere Microsoft softly weeps at the death of Photosynth... I recently rediscovered Photosynth and I'm pretty impressed with it, but having a panorama mode baked right into the OS/camera app pretty much seals it's fate as an app on my phone.

Somewhere Microsoft softly weeps at the death of Photosynth... I recently rediscovered Photosynth and I'm pretty impressed with it, but having a panorama mode baked right into the OS/camera app pretty much seals it's fate as an app on my phone.

Photosynth has 2 modes - until iPhone can stitch together 100s of photos for a "synth" i think it will stick around, if in limited capacity

The killer would be a panorama app that could tile (horizontal and vertical) as well as create an image much larger than the amount specified in this article. I've done panoramas with my Canon 60D and the software I use is tied to a photo printing facility that can print really large panoramas. They calculate the largest size possible with the image submitted, trying to keep people from sending them low-resolution images and getting less than optimal prints in return. The 10K x 2.5K image isn't useful on anything much longer than 30" or so. Yes, that sounds big until you see printed panoramas in excess of 6 feet. This application is a great start, which I'll be trying on Friday or Saturday on my iPhone 5,

In what sense would a smartphone app designed to produce 6 foot banners be "killer"?

How much does printing such a banner cost (a lot), and why would you create one with smartphone camera?

I can now see that 2012-2013 will be indelibly linked in history as the age of "panoramas" everywhere. Like too many fonts in early 1994 with desktop publishing, and the reflecting floor itunes thing we had in 2006.

Not that I won't make them, share them, and throw them into brochures left and right. You have to embrace the design aesthetic of your age after all.

Or, a pano inside the dome of St. Peters -- where you move as you move the camera.

Canyon De Chelly ("Save a Deli for Canyon De Chelly")

Anything/everything in Barcelona.

Sweet Jesus, I was just at the Sistine Chapel last week, and was commenting the same thing to myself, my new Alpha 57 (with unbelievably great pano mode) clenched in my fist with lens cap securely in place.

I did take a nice pano inside the Pantheon, however, as well as one that would have been beautiful in Pompeii if I had been wise enough to use a smaller aperture (my wife was slightly out of focus).

Or, a pano inside the dome of St. Peters -- where you move as you move the camera.

Canyon De Chelly ("Save a Deli for Canyon De Chelly")

Anything/everything in Barcelona.

Sweet Jesus, I was just at the Sistine Chapel last week, and was commenting the same thing to myself, my new Alpha 57 (with unbelievably great pano mode) clenched in my fist with lens cap securely in place.

I did take a nice pano inside the Pantheon, however, as well as one that would have been beautiful in Pompeii if I had been wise enough to use a smaller aperture (my wife was slightly out of focus).

Great shot!

There are just so many historical sites -- and pano is now available to anyone. There will be a lot of crap, but there will be some amazing tech-artistic breakthroughs too!

Edited by Dick Applebaum - 9/19/12 at 1:28pm

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The killer would be a panorama app that could tile (horizontal and vertical) as well as create an image much larger than the amount specified in this article. I've done panoramas with my Canon 60D and the software I use is tied to a photo printing facility that can print really large panoramas. They calculate the largest size possible with the image submitted, trying to keep people from sending them low-resolution images and getting less than optimal prints in return. The 10K x 2.5K image isn't useful on anything much longer than 30" or so. Yes, that sounds big until you see printed panoramas in excess of 6 feet. This application is a great start, which I'll be trying on Friday or Saturday on my iPhone 5,

Our iDevices take photos at just 72ppi (whereas DSLRs are ~ 288ppi). The photo purist motto is not to print lower than 150ppi which holds true for magazines and the like but not for massive prints you put up on your wall. It's like sitting one foot away from a 60" 1080p TV and saying you can see the pixels. These panorama shots are 10k pixels wide - that's a shed load and look awesome printed when utilised at the native resolution which works out at over 12 feet!

The killer would be a panorama app that could tile (horizontal and vertical) as well as create an image much larger than the amount specified in this article. I've done panoramas with my Canon 60D and the software I use is tied to a photo printing facility that can print really large panoramas. They calculate the largest size possible with the image submitted, trying to keep people from sending them low-resolution images and getting less than optimal prints in return. The 10K x 2.5K image isn't useful on anything much longer than 30" or so. Yes, that sounds big until you see printed panoramas in excess of 6 feet. This application is a great start, which I'll be trying on Friday or Saturday on my iPhone 5,

Our iDevices take photos at just 72ppi (whereas DSLRs are ~ 288ppi). The photo purist motto is not to print lower than 150ppi which holds true for magazines and the like but not for massive prints you put up on your wall. It's like sitting one foot away from a 60" 1080p TV and saying you can see the pixels. These panorama shots are 10k pixels wide - that's a shed load and look awesome printed when utilised at the native resolution which works out at over 12 feet!

Yes, but resolution where? On the sensor? When you print it to some arbitrary size? It is meaningless to refer to PPI on a camera - all that matters is MP.
PPI matters on a display or on a print - nowhere else.

Agree it's meaningless when the photo is sitting on your camera but as soon as you pull it into Photoshop and go to print it becomes material.

Yes, but resolution where? On the sensor? When you print it to some arbitrary size? It is meaningless to refer to PPI on a camera - all that matters is MP.
PPI matters on a display or on a print - nowhere else.

Agree it's meaningless when the photo is sitting on your camera but as soon as you pull it into Photoshop and go to print it becomes material.

A 3k pixel wide photo taken on a DSLR at 288ppi will look better on screen and in print at 100% than one taken on an iphone at 72ppi. However the iOS panorama photos at 10k pixel wide @ 72ppi print out natively at almost 4m so you will be standing far enough back from the print for it not to be material.

Cliffs - iPhone 5/4s & iPod Touch with (iOS6) can take panoramic photos that look awesome when printed full size (up to 150") at a high enough dpi.

When you go to display or print the image, the available resolution (PPI) on the display medium is entirely determined by the ratio of the linear size of the image from the camera and the linear size of the print or display. That is why "taken on a DSLR at 288 ppi" or "taken on an iPhone at 72 ppi" are both completely meaningless and incorrect statements.

When you go to display or print the image, the available resolution (PPI) on the display medium is entirely determined by the ratio of the linear size of the image from the camera and the linear size of the print or display. That is why "taken on a DSLR at 288 ppi" or "taken on an iPhone at 72 ppi" are both completely meaningless and incorrect statements.

Agree with that, couldn't edit my clouded thinking in time due to a solid bottle of South African red :)

PPI determines the effective print size - my point was that printing a 10k px wide photo at 72ppi works fine as it comes out so damn big.

When you go to display or print the image, the available resolution (PPI) on the display medium is entirely determined by the ratio of the linear size of the image from the camera and the linear size of the print or display. That is why "taken on a DSLR at 288 ppi" or "taken on an iPhone at 72 ppi" are both completely meaningless and incorrect statements.

Agree with that, couldn't edit my clouded thinking in time due to a solid bottle of South African red :)

PPI determines the effective print size - my point was that printing a 10k px wide photo at 72ppi works fine as it comes out so damn big.

OK - we agree then. And 72 PPI is certainly OK for a large print on the wall, although I would upsample to 150 just to prevent any obvious pixelation when you get closer to it than intended - I prefer that the visual resolution limiting factor not be the pixels. Although even 72 will look just fine with enough red wine.

OK - we agree then. And 72 PPI is certainly OK for a large print on the wall, although I would upsample to 150 just to prevent any obvious pixelation when you get closer to it than intended - I prefer that the visual resolution limiting factor not be the pixels. Although even 72 will look just fine with enough red wine.

OK - we agree then. And 72 PPI is certainly OK for a large print on the wall, although I would upsample to 150 just to prevent any obvious pixelation when you get closer to it than intended - I prefer that the visual resolution limiting factor not be the pixels. Although even 72 will look just fine with enough red wine.

I'm having a difficult time understanding the resolution situation. I understand how in Photoshop(PS) you can take an iPhone5 72ppi (3264x2448) image and it does not need to be upsampled to print at 306ppi (2448x3264pix) giving a 8x10 print using all the pixels. If I wanted to print this image at 24x32 it would print at 102ppi indicating I may wish to upsample, add more pixels.

If I save the iPhone pic at 306ppi & 8x10" file size (no upsampling) it uses all the pixels supplied. If I open this pic to view it, it looks identical to the original, being fuzzy with loss of detail.

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If I take a pic from my real camera the info from PS gives:

300ppi 13.3x10"(W/Ht) 4000x3000pix 2.6MB

A photo from iPhone5 info from PS gives:

72ppi 45.3x34'(W/Ht) 3264x2448pix 3.49MB

** I can take this iPhone pic & upsample in PS to give the following info:

300ppi 13.3x10" 3990x2993 (essentially 4000x3000) 4.45MB

So at this point,except for file size (2.6MB vs 4.45MB) both pics (one from my home camera & one from iPhone5) are sized the same. If I open each on my iMac the home camera pic is far superior in detail, sharp & crisp to the iPhone pic, even though the iPhone pic has almost double the total MP. The iPhone pic always looks the same on the monitor compared to its untouched original. How can the iPhone image have so much more total MB size yet look so much inferior? What am I missing here? Why does my home camera pics look so much better even when I supposedly make both (home camera & iPhone) pics of equal quality?

My camera takes pics at 300ppi resolution. The iPhone takes at 72ppi resolution. Import both pics to my computer (27" iMac 2.8 GHz Quad Core i7; 8 GB DDR3 SDRAM 2x4; 2 TB Serial ATA Drive; ATI Radeon HD 4850 Graphics with 512 MB) and they are not the same quality when viewed on monitor. My monitor is set to 2560x1440 resolution. When the iPhone pic is processed to match the camera pic via PS (changed from 72 to 300ppi & equal size) it still looks significantly of lower quality. I don't understand how this can be when the iPhone pic has the pixels to work with.

OK - we agree then. And 72 PPI is certainly OK for a large print on the wall, although I would upsample to 150 just to prevent any obvious pixelation when you get closer to it than intended - I prefer that the visual resolution limiting factor not be the pixels. Although even 72 will look just fine with enough red wine.

I'm having a difficult time understanding the resolution situation. I understand how in Photoshop(PS) you can take an iPhone5 72ppi (3264x2448) image and it does not need to be upsampled to print at 306ppi (2448x3264pix) giving a 8x10 print using all the pixels. If I wanted to print this image at 24x32 it would print at 102ppi indicating I may wish to upsample, add more pixels.

If I save the iPhone pic at 306ppi & 8x10" file size (no upsampling) it uses all the pixels supplied. If I open this pic to view it, it looks identical to the original, being fuzzy with loss of detail.

_________________________________

If I take a pic from my real camera the info from PS gives:

300ppi 13.3x10"(W/Ht) 4000x3000pix 2.6MB

A photo from iPhone5 info from PS gives:

72ppi 45.3x34'(W/Ht) 3264x2448pix 3.49MB

** I can take this iPhone pic & upsample in PS to give the following info:

300ppi 13.3x10" 3990x2993 (essentially 4000x3000) 4.45MB

So at this point,except for file size (2.6MB vs 4.45MB) both pics (one from my home camera & one from iPhone5) are sized the same. If I open each on my iMac the home camera pic is far superior in detail, sharp & crisp to the iPhone pic, even though the iPhone pic has almost double the total MP. The iPhone pic always looks the same on the monitor compared to its untouched original. How can the iPhone image have so much more total MB size yet look so much inferior? What am I missing here? Why does my home camera pics look so much better even when I supposedly make both (home camera & iPhone) pics of equal quality?

My camera takes pics at 300ppi resolution. The iPhone takes at 72ppi resolution. Import both pics to my computer (27" iMac 2.8 GHz Quad Core i7; 8 GB DDR3 SDRAM 2x4; 2 TB Serial ATA Drive; ATI Radeon HD 4850 Graphics with 512 MB) and they are not the same quality when viewed on monitor. My monitor is set to 2560x1440 resolution. When the iPhone pic is processed to match the camera pic via PS (changed from 72 to 300ppi & equal size) it still looks significantly of lower quality. I don't understand how this can be when the iPhone pic has the pixels to work with.

You seem to be confusing different ways to measure the image. Camera sensors have discrete elements that produce an image comprising an equivalent number of pixels (e.g. 3264 x 2448). There are no linear dimensions associated with that image file, so PPI does not mean anything until you project or print that image to a particular size. The iPhone does not take 72 PPI images, it takes 3264 x 2448 pixel images.

When Photoshop opens an image it associates it with document dimensions as shown in the "Image Size" dialog box, and those document dimensions are arbitrary. The resolution (PPI) shown there is just the pixel dimension (number of pixels) in a given direction divided by the document dimension in that direction, and it only exists in the context of the assigned document dimensions. PPI is generally the same in both directions since the pixels are equally spaced in both directions. You can change document dimensions or PPI in Photoshop by resampling (changing the number of pixels) or you can change both inversely with one another without resampling provided new PPI x new linear dimension = unchanged linear pixel dimension (number of pixels in that direction).

The file size (MB) does not always correlate well with pixel dimensions (number of pixels in the image) because you are using compressed JPEG files rather than lossless TIFF files, so the file size depends on both the number of pixels and the level of compression. You can change the amount of compression in Photoshop, but different cameras compress by default to different levels.

As for the relative image quality - that is determined by much more than simply the number of pixels. Lens quality, focussing precision, sensor noise, noise reduction algorithms etc. all affect image quality. A real camera with a much larger lens may well take much better images even with fewer pixels.